Carla's Story

What Happened: When we first met, he was everything a girl would want him to be, charming, funny, cute. He basically knew how to make everybody fall in love with him. As time went on, slowly he tried to control each aspect of my life.

Friends, school, even family, and I let him because I had never been in a serious relationship and I thought what he was doing was normal. He became my best friend and I believed everything he said. He would constantly tell me I was inadequate, that I didn’t care, that I was selfish and the cause of all our problems and I didn’t want to change.

What’s worse is that I believed him. Every problem he had, he blamed on me, and would always start fights. He was never happy, I was never good enough. He would threaten me, and use emotional blackmail to keep me where he wanted me. He would get angry over nothing, punch walls and blame it all on me. I always thought he would suddenly wake up, but he never did. In his eyes nothing is ever his fault.

How I coped: My family all banded together and helped me come out of it with a plan. He is a very dangerous person and would stalk my home, so the plan is to get away from home and school for two weeks. I’m going to stay with a relative who lives a while away, change my mobile number and hope to avoid him for as long as possible. The support that everybody is giving me is amazing, even people I thought I had lost are still here for me.

What helped me: Although he never physically touched me, he would threaten to hit me all the time. He knew exactly was what I was scared of, and although he would never actually do it, he would always threaten me with it to make me do what he wanted. It helps just knowing that I have everybody around me to help me through this and also that I know deep down that I don’t deserve any of this. I’m worth more than this and deserve more.

My advice to others: Don’t stand for it another day, try to distance yourself from it while you make your plan. You need a plan before you get out – I have broken up with him many times but he would blackmail or threaten me to get back with him. This time it’s do or die, I have everybody behind me.

If I can do it, you can too. You have nothing to lose, and will end up being a lot happier once you have done it.

Nobody deserves this, NOBODY! Everybody deserves to be treated as they want to be, and if that’s not happening, get away from the situation as soon as possible!

Olga’s story

Every morning Olga Vasquez* would wake up wondering if she would live to see the next day. Isolated in her home, she suffered in silence at the hands of her father’s brutal wrath, trapped in an ever-escalating cycle of abuse. Olga would also witness her father beat her mother and her siblings on a regular basis. When her mother eventually fled, leaving her children behind, Olga focused on protecting her siblings from her father’s rage.http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/guatemala_60748.html